The Death Throes of the High Street? – Part 2

The attack on the high street retailer

Since the 1980s local councils and planning departments have allegedly been working to improve shoppers’ experiences in the centres of their towns and cities. To this end they have virtually banned the car from the ‘High Street’ area, by a combination of ‘redevelopment’, shopping malls, pedestrianisation and many with ‘park and ride’ services.

Sounds great on paper, including the ‘artist impressions’ illustrations that we see on public planning information, with happy looking people enjoying a cappuccino at an outdoor café table. However the reality is a little different.

What of the person who wants to ‘pop into’ town for a few things? This is no longer possible, no more parking for half an hour near the deli or butchers that you might have used for years, picking up the dry-cleaning and a newspaper. These regular local customers provided the ‘bread-and-butter’ trade for so many local specialists and traders. Instead, the process of getting into town alone takes half an hour of negotiation of traffic lights and traffic calming measures, then there’s the pay and display, often situated 15 minutes walk from where you want to go and costs an outrageous amount or park and ride (which adds at least an hour in itself).

Ever increasing business rates in town centres together with an often increasingly heavy burden of legislative requirements have made survival, let alone success impossibility for the small, specialist or family business.

City and town centres have become the domain of larger national chains, including café and fast food offerings. Increasingly, fewer of the larger chains remain, and the city centres are becoming populated at best by M&S, Next and Starbucks together with others who can stand the high rates and can still make a profit under pressure of recession due to their strong well established brands, or at worst by charity shops and boarded-up windows.

Many of the national chains have reacted by duplicating or completely moving their stores to out-of-town shopping centres and abandoning the town and city centres that had been the trading centres of these locations for a hundred years.

The new out-of-town enterprise zones were a success from the start. Initially a novelty, each one growing and drawing more and more shoppers with their super-stores, discount centres and designer outlets; huge free car parks and drive through fast-food to the point they are now a ‘destination’ and over-congested by traffic and their own success.

Then along came online shopping. No travelling, no speed cameras, no parking problems, no congestion, no delays, no queues at the checkout (well not very often anyway – Next had to put in an online queuing system for their checkout during the Christmas 2009 sale so high was demand on their website) and no waiting in traffic to get home.

Now that 90% of the UK has access to broadband, (even though only 60% actually do) and with laptop computers readily available for just a few hundred pounds, many of the barriers to home computing, now overcome, open the floodgates for online shopping. It would be nice if the broadband were faster and available all over country, for the consumer to have easier to use software and websites, but it’s still better than negotiating busy towns or shopping centres

Let’s look at the example young mother (or of course father) with two small children who needs to buy their weekly groceries.

We asked lots of people in this type of situation, so that the scenario below is representative of an average or typically common experience of the difficulties that arise.

The eldest child is aged 4 and a baby of 9 months. Their car is parked on the street, and as the parking is quite busy at times, then it is not always possible to park directly outside the house.

They usually go to a large supermarket in the out-of-town shopping centre around 6 miles away. So she has to get the two children ready, load the car and set off to the supermarket. If the car is not immediately outside the house, then what are the difficult logistics of this? It seems unavoidable, yet unacceptable to leave the children alone at some point as it is probably not physically possible to negotiate a toddler, a baby, and all the paraphernalia required to a car in one go, so what is done first? Of course there will soon be the requisite shopping bags to add to the list as supermarkets are under pressure to reduce the number used and those who still give bags will soon be charging.

Practically everyone who I asked who has small children said that getting them dressed and organised, remembering everything, dealing with every detail and difficulty can take an hour, and this can often be a very stressful one!

She sets off in the car after resolving this problem and heads to the supermarket. As it is the weekend, when she gets there the car park is quite full, so finding a mother and child car parking place is not easy, she knows that without the extra space alongside the car to get the baby and child out of their restraining seats and safely into a trolley the likelihood of damaging her or the next car in the car park are highly likely, and insurance is expensive enough already.

Now she needs a suitable trolley to hold the two children. Another logistics problem, does she lock the children in the car while getting a trolley, or get them out and carry them to the trolley bay? And now it’s starting to rain.

Lots of parents we spoke to said that sometimes this is simply not physically possible let alone safe.

Once into the shop the 4 year old is refusing to stay in the trolley seat, he wants to get out and walk. Worn down by the fuss and tantrum that is building up, she lifts him out of the trolley to be immediately faced with a new problem, keeping up with him and making sure he does not disappear and get lost or worse. She wishes that she had remembered to bring the child reins or wrist link, but he hates it and it just makes life even harder so she only uses it when walking in traffic.

After negotiating the aisles, trying to remember everything – goodness knows where the list went in all the chaos of trying to get everyone into and out of the car - she finally gets to the checkout to pay for her weekly shop, and joins a long queue. The baby is bored and hungry now, and fed up of sitting in the trolley, she is reaching for the goods piled up on the belt (someone else’s shopping) and has succeeded in grabbing a multipack of crisps which she proceeds to shake and squeeze into dust. Now embarrassed, she has a dilemma where she cannot offer to go and get a replacement for the shopper in front, even though it is her fault and she knows it, eventually she manages to get a harassed shop-floor supervisor whom after some confusion about whether she wants the crisps or why the replacement is needed, gets a replacement for the shopper in front of her.

Finally, her shopping is paid for, the checkout operator thankfully helped her with the packing, but still the little boy will not get back into the trolley seat and now it is really raining as they head for the car, negotiating the hazards of the car park where drivers now have a combination of increased motivation to park near the door with reduced visibility.

Again there is the dilemma of getting the children and into the car and now laden with shopping in the now pouring rain, and someone’s parked a van really close to the passenger side of the car where the baby’s seat is located, now she has to struggle to get her in across the width of the car, hurting her back in the process. What’s more, she can’t let her little boy climb into his seat first or she wouldn’t have the room to be able to strap in the baby (which she normally does from the passenger side. He is not happy and has started screaming and shouting, passers-by are looking and her stress levels are reaching maximum levels for today. At last everything is in and they can head for home.

Its all taken much longer than expected so now they are in the traffic at the busiest time of day, the children are hungry and complaining, the car is misted up and she is trying not to think about whether any significant damage was done to the car door that bumped the car next to her as her little boy climbed in. Her headache is mounting and exhaustion is mounting, and she has to make an overdue lunch as soon as she gets home.

When they get back, there is nowhere to park near the house, so the whole palaver has to be carried out in reverse, the children taken into the house, then the shopping in numerous trips, and between visits to the car, her little boy manages to pull one of the bags of shopping off the table, smashing a glass jar of mayonnaise in the process.

As many of the people we talked to, the whole experience is time consuming and can be stressful and exhausting, often taking 3 or 4 hours (and feeling much longer) from start to finish.

What is the alternative for our young (or not so young) mother (or father)?
Use those 4 precious weekend hours to have quality time with the children. One evening in the week, after they have been put to bed at night, make a cup of tea, or even better, pour a nice glass of wine and go online. Order the groceries and other requirements, pay online on one of the many supermarket websites and a few days later a nice person from the supermarket will come along and put the groceries inside the front door. All that is now left to do is put them into the cupboards while the children are playing, happy and safe where they can be kept under a watchful eye.

The next article will look at what the business case for get on a level playing field and start building business online – reaching a wider audience that could only be dreamt of before.

Samples: how much is too much?

There is no doubt that the knowledge industries represent the future of the economy. The sector has seen phenomenal growth in the last decade that shows no sign of slowing up.

If you’re in the business of knowledge of some kind, particularly of information provision, or specific expertise that might be delivered as consultancy or some other kind of knowledge exchange, then you may find yourself constantly up against a paradox: like in some other types of business, in order to sell what you make or do, you need to give some away. However, the problem with giving away knowledge is just that, once you’ve given it away there is no taking it back, it can’t be cancelled or repossessed, it’s out there.

We recently visited the Royal Welsh Show, the one of the largest shows in the UK, which in 2010 attracted almost a quarter of a million visitors from over forty countries. Along with many other attractions and trade offerings, there is a dedicated food hall where producers and manufacturers of traditional or innovative food and drink were plying their wares to the general public and potentially professional buyers alike.

It did not take a genius to notice a phenomenon that was clear: all the stands that were offering free samples had crowds around them, where in contrast, those who were not offering samples of any kind were largely and in some cases entirely, bereft of both visitors and customers.

As they stood there with their glum faces, I felt like saying (or even shouting) if you don’t get anyone into your shop – or in this case to stop at the counter instead of moving on the next stand where there were free sausages or cider on offer - then you can’t sell anything! The online equivalent of this of course is effective website traffic generating activities such as SEO, PPC, link-building and so on.

It has to be noted that this is a place to shop, and there was no shortage of shopping opportunities, over 1000 trade stands were at the show and no shortfall in money being spent, the organisers reported that cash machines on the showground dispensed over £1.2 million, bearing in mind that is money that is extra to that which exhibitors and visitors had brought with them, and credit and debit card sales.

Of course there is little doubt that many of those taking advantage of the free samples were simply trying, and succeeding in, getting their hands on a free lunch. Although if every tenth or even hundredth person bought something on the spot or at some point in the future then it is worth it; and if that one pro-buyer walking around was tempted to stop at a particular stand they might be in the market for a tonne of sausages a week and secure the future of that business.

The next step of course is that once they are at the counter then they must have a good experience, be welcomed with smiling faces and the irresistible prospect of a freshly cooked sample of local produce whether a steaming sausage, a chilled (albeit small) sample of cider or similar. Those who were giving samples in this way were the ones making the sales. Others had samples on offer, but were not so keen or needed to be asked and were in turn not so successful, the smallest barrier – where there was so much competition on offer – was enough to make the browsing customer move on to the next stand or shop. The same thing happens online, each time the user encounters a barrier it contributes to the detriment of the user‘s experience, and while each individual thing might be very small, the accumulative effect can be enough to bring the point of frustration beyond the level of motivation to continue. What happens then? Then back button, and your competitors are only a click or two away.

Back to giving away your knowledge, it’s a really difficult thing, lots of people find themselves in an impossible situation where in order to prove that they know something, or are capable of providing the serviced they are trying to sell, they feel that they have to reveal their possibly ‘secret’ knowledge. Others, perhaps through their passion and enthusiasm for their subject, inadvertently give it away. The principle may be to give a little away, holding back the crucial content for the order or contract,

A sample is clearly what is needed. It is important to realise that it must be properly representative if what is on offer. Not a low quality version, or something that is common knowledge or available to everyone, in order to demonstrate expertise then you must do just that, give a sample of your real expertise and not be afraid of doing so.

A key point lies in specifics: be prepared with samples that are specific to your offering, and reveal a choice morsel or offer a useful tip – and I mean useful to the person to whom you are offering it – but that does not go into specifics about that persons’ company or problem (that you are hoping or proposing to help or solve).

This brings the question of how much is too much? There needs to be enough to get a proper taste, one of the stands at the Royal Welsh show was giving samples of soft cheese that were practically too small to see let alone taste, it might have been expensive, but gave the impression of meanness, and no-one wants to deal with someone who is mean. Of course you need to ensure that it is not enough to satisfy the appetite, enough to get the saliva flowing and taste buds awake, but definitely not a free meal!